One advantage I’ve always had that seems not common in humans is that I’ve always been able to completely ignore when someone tells me that I am not good at something.

It seems to really diminish most people. However, I seem constitutionally incapable of caring what anyone thinks about my prowess one way or another if it’s something I either enjoy doing or merely want to do.

I think that is partly – likely mostly – personality, but that I also know that I tend to be worse than anyone else by far when I first attempt to do something, but learn much faster and then in the end usually without that much effort end up doing pretty well.

Not having normal responses to many things in the areas I care about has only been a benefit to me so far.

Coleridge and me, we would’ve understood one another:

“Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens – it either stupifies me, and then I perhaps look at a merry-make & dance the hay of Flies, or listen entirely to the loud Click of the great Clock / or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophic Self-complacency. – For a thing at the moment is but a Thing of the moment / it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself thro’ the whole multitude of Shapes & Thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged – between which & it some new Thought is not engendered / this a work of Time / but the Body feels it quicken with me—-”

So often I think of nothing, awash in trying to perceive.

Even in the context of the financial crash, we spend too much time examining and pillorying the behavior of individuals and even institutions when we should be instead evaluating and combating problems that are systemically based.

Of course, the focus on the system is what is intended to be diverted by the sacrificial scapegoats offered up from time to time. Which is to say, Lehman Brothers and Enron, Angelo Mozilo and Bernie Madoff – the prosecution and the vilification of these institutions and individuals serve to perpetuate the system as it stands, not to diminish it.

Good cover. She has a nice setup.

How Fiat Money Works.

It’s a complete waste of time and resources for the federal government to assess taxes at all. It’s perhaps a necessary fiction, though, as long as it is used (as is not the case now) to reduce wealth inequality. And as the article points out it guarantees demand for the currency.

But that’s in an ideal world and we don’t live in that world. To regular people, money is something in your pocket even though the vast majority of money is represented in a computer somewhere and is never physical.

Odd the limitations humans impose on systems despite the concepts not being that difficult.

Holy crap, ABC is going to air a show about a badass woman written by female writers.

Will it be good? I hope so. Better chance of it than some boring sitcom, anyway.

Will be watching.

This is a good, snarky piece but it is also completely wrong over the long term about robotics and other automation technology (as is typical of people removed from the field).

It reminds me of the legions of people in 1980 saying things like, “The desktop PC can never do what mainframes do, ever!” I remember reading those articles, even though the revisionist history is that they were never written.

And of course only a few years later desktop PCs were doing just that act of replacing, and more.

Most people have no idea just how quickly robotics technology and practical AI is advancing. Yes, Roger Smith was wrong and venal and stupid. But that doesn’t mean that automation isn’t getting easier and cheaper all the time.

Even in my field, things that I used to do only a few years ago manually of necessity are completely automated now. Those jobs just don’t exist any more. They will never come back.

This is happening and will continue to happen to other areas of the economy. Think fast food workers aren’t paid much now? Wait thirty years and here’s how much they’ll be paid: nothing. Because there won’t be any.

This switch to robotics and ever-increasing automation will take most people – like the writer of the piece to which I linked – by complete surprise even though the signs are obvious.

Note that I am not arguing that this is a good thing or even a bad thing. In this piece I hold no value judgment about it whatsoever. I am merely stating that no matter what anyone thinks, it is inevitable.

I said this twenty years ago and was laughed at.

Now it has become inevitable. I don’t like having the last laugh about something so horrible.

In the eternal quest to remove all useful features and just have a blank map, Google removes one of the most useful features from Google Maps.

I jest, that isn’t the actual goal.

The actual intent is even worse, because it’s all about the ad income. The more Google can control and direct your searches, the more they can make on ads. That is what this change is all about – them deciding what they want you to find, not allowing you to find what you actually searched for.

Google has been and will be corrupted by this insidious and largely-unconscious (at an individual worker level in Google) drive to remove features that allow the user freedom, because user freedom means ads sell for less.

You’d have spent $3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars.

When economists who are of the old mode claim that there have been no productivity increases since 1980 or whenever — which seems to happen a great deal as they use very old-fashioned and incorrect definitions of productivity — I point to something like this as a glaring counterexample.

It’s not quite as applicable perhaps as other examples that could be used, but it is more obvious. It’s apparentness helps to drive the point home.

A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible.

As recently as 1980 or so, an extremely smart person could understand pretty much everything in the technology world. Now that is no longer remotely possible.

But that happens over and over again — in 1800, the same was true for science.

As the world gets more complex, it’s just not possible for one human mind to hold much of it. I have a fairly broad and pretty wide understanding of IT, but I probably know 2-3% of the IT world reasonably well. The average IT person is probably somewhere in the 0.25% to 0.5% range.

And unfortunately the world gets more complex all the time, so the amount one person can understand gets lower each year. So, relatively, we are all getting dumber all the time.

Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules.

Net neutrality was always doomed. The Net itself is doomed; it’s always been in a state of perpetual and inevitable doom so as long as it is uncontrolled, which makes it too much of a threat to corporations.

According to some fucknuggets in the comments here, the reason Windows 8 utterly failed was poor marketing.

Right.

And the reason communism failed was because they picked the wrong logo colors.

Sure.

Windows 8 failed because it was completely hostile to 99% of its user base and anyone who needs to get actual work done. That some people who only click on YouTube videos and LOLCat pictures find it perfectly acceptable means nothing. They would’ve found a fucking Etch-a-Sketch acceptable.

I’ve been using MacOS for the past few days somewhat frequently and despite some small niggles, it is a great OS that makes things easy that should be easy, while still allowing power users the ability to do what they need to do.

In other words, it is a masterfully-designed OS that perfectly balances functionality, elegance of presentation and power.

Meanwhile, Windows 8 is a perfect turd of an OS that balances 1994-like AOL looks, the elegance of a Lada, and the power of a broken pop gun.

Really no comparison at all.

I agree with this – Warner Brothers is leaving a few billion dollars on the table by not making any Wonder Woman films.

Get Jennifer Lawrence to play the part, and every fan in the universe would go apeshit and the movie would gross $100 million the first weekend no matter how good or bad it turned out to be.

When people complain about Tolkien’s lack of writing chops, it merely reveals their lack of historical knowledge of what tradition Tolkien was drawing from and what he was attempting to achieve.

He was of course writing in the tradition of epic mythology – specifically Northern European mythology – and following many of the writing conventions and styles of that genre in his most-known work, The Lord of the Rings.

Wagner’s also-turgid and epic Der Ring des Nibelungen flows from the same source, though is considered a classic in most circles because of its genre and that the composer is longer-dead than Tolkien.

If you read translated works of Old English, Norse, German and Finnish mythology, unsurprisingly they sound and read just like LOTR.

It’s not really that Tolkien’s writing was bad, then, but that as an academic he made the mistake of accidentally writing a popular work. And even worse, it had magic and elves in it.

In nearly any field, there are few worse crimes than exceeding your peers. In academia it seems a particularly high crime for some reason, and there were few guiltier of that particular infraction than Tolkien.

And for that he has never been and never will be forgiven.